Happy new year

Happy new year! December was a wash with nothing being achieved before we flew down to Christchurch for xmas. I did however get a little bit of modelling in while I was away, having a bit of fun with the Jörgen Edgar technique for making N scale locomotives quickly. And come Christmas day, I was pretty spoilt with models, kitsets, people, tools, and even books. So no complaints here!

Ranuska scenery

Ranuska is coming along well. I have made an executive decision not to use the "tall skinny house", it just didn't seem to fit with everything else. It will be used elsewhere I am sure though. Instead I have turned the area into a small overgrown park.

Just need to add a picnic table or two and maybe some racoons.

I've mostly finished the scenery around the buildings now, with the path to the Kato building getting some steps now too:

LRT arrives in Utrainia

A very exciting new arrival in Utrania is their very first LRT (light rail transit) vehicle. The Santram is from the Tomytec train collection, and comes as a small plastic model and an optional motorisation kit. It only takes 30s to swap over the mechanisms to make a working model. I can't wait to see it gliding into Ranuska.

Cobblestones

The single largest remaining job for Ranuska is to make all the cobblestones on the tram track by the sea. I estimate between 5-10 thousand of them will need to be carved!

I've done three different tiling patterns to keep things interesting.

The base layer is my trusty DAS air dry clay. Then I use my scriber (a paintbrush handle with a drawing pin in the end) and a lump of thin wood to score lines in the surface. It took a few minutes to get the pattern right, after that I scribed away while listening to Rachel's latest TV series (a musical about knights?!).

Two and a bit hours later:

Neat!